It is impossible to imagine how different the history of the
past century and a half would have been had any of the leading arbiters of
world affairs addressed by Bahá’u’lláh spared time for reflection on a
conception of reality supported by the moral credentials of its Author, moral
credentials of the kind they professed to hold in the highest regard. What is
unmistakable to a Bahá’í is that, despite such failure, the transformations
announced in Bahá’u’lláh’s message are resistlessly accomplishing themselves.
Through shared discoveries and shared travails, peoples of diverse cultures are
brought face to face with the common humanity lying just beneath the surface of
imagined differences of identity. Whether stubbornly opposed in some societies
or welcomed elsewhere as a release from meaningless and suffocating
limitations, the sense that the earth’s inhabitants are indeed “the leaves of
one tree” is slowly becoming the standard by which humanity’s collective
efforts are now judged.
(From “One Common Faith”, a document commissioned by
and prepared under the supervision of the Universal House of Justice, 2005)
